Schedule & Speakers

Provost Elaine Meyer-Lee

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Bonnetta Adeeb, President and Founder of STEAM Onward

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Zoom recording

Join Bonnetta Adeeb in a conversation about how we recognize and acknowledge the deep agricultural histories of African traditions and African American land cultivation as roots critical to the future of sustainable and equitable food systems.  

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Bonnetta Adeeb is the President and Founder of STEAM Onward, a non-profit organization located in Southern Maryland, dedicated to bringing minority and under-served youth into STEM careers, agriculture, and innovation. Her community work and organizational engagements address health and nutrition disparities that support families, neighborhoods, and institutional partners. Adeeb is an environmental justice leader in the region who uses seed saving, heritage of the land, and agricultural storytelling to bridge the gaps between the realities and needs of communities of color and the work of environmental fields. She serves with the National Cooperative Gardens Commission and advises on committees for state and national elected offices.

Ellice Patterson, Founder & Executive and Artistic Director of Abilities Dance

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Zoom recording

Join Ellice Paterson, the founder/executive and artistic director of Abilities Dance Company, and Ramona Baker, director of the M.A. in Arts Administration at Goucher, in a discussion about ways to disrupt ableism and how Ellice brings artists with and without disabilities together in music and dance.  Q & A will follow the short interview so please bring your questions and comments, and join us for this discussion on ways to build an equitable future for everyone.  

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Ellice Patterson is the founder/ executive and artistic director of Abilities Dance, a Boston-based dance company that welcomes artists with and without disabilities. She is also the executive director of BalletRox, a Boston-based dance education program to provide access to high quality dance education to youth within Boston Public Schools and in our after-school program in Jamaica Plain. Outside of self-produced Abilities Dance's shows, her choreography has appeared in the MFA, Links Hall in Chicago, Gibney Dance in NYC, The Series: Vol IV at the Ailey Citigroup Theatre in NYC, and more. She has given lectures and workshops at schools, universities, and organizations across the country, including Harvard Graduate School of Education, Fidelity Investments, Boston University, and more. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Biological Sciences from Wellesley College and her Masters of Science in Management Studies from Boston University Questrom School of Business. 

Norma Elia Cantú, President of the American Folklore Society and Murchison Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University

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Zoom recording

Join us for a conversation with folklorist and writer Norma Elia Cantú about the critical role that cultural sustainability plays in creating the conditions for an equitable future. Through images and stories, Dr. Cantú will share compelling models for how communities are claiming agency and fostering equity through their arts and culture.

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Norma Elia Cantú currently serves as the President of the American Folklore Society and Murchison Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, where she teaches Latinx and Chicanx Studies. A daughter of the borderlands, she focuses on the US-Mexico border for her research and scholarly work as well as her poetry, fiction and personal essays. She has coedited over 10 books on a number of subjects including art (Moctezuma’s Table: Rolando Briseños Chicano Tablescapes and Ofrenda: Liliana Wilson’s Art of Dissidence and Dreams), in STEM (Paths to Discovery: Autobiographies of Chicanas with Careers in Mathematics, Science, and Engineering), Texas Studies (Entre Guadalupe y Malinche: Tejanas in Literature and Art), and in Folklore (Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change and Dancing Across Borders: Danzas y Bailes Mexicanos). She has received awards for her work from the Modern Languages Association, the American Folklore Society, the Tejas Foco of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies, and The University of California, Santa Barbara as well as numerous community organizations. She co-founded CantoMundo and is a member of the Macondo Writers Workshop; she currently serves on the board of the latter and of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. Her research and creative writing have earned her an international reputation, and she is a frequent keynote and plenary invited speaker. She has read her work in Europe, Asia, and throughout the US and Mexico. The award-winning Canícula: Snapshots of a Girlhood en la Frontera, is taught in numerous universities in the US and in Europe. She translated Gloria Anzaldóa’s Borderlands/la Frontera into Spanish. She most recently published the co-edited anthologies meXicana Fashions: Politics, Self-Adornment, and Identity Construction and Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Pedagogies and Practices for our Classrooms and Communities, Cabañuelas, a novel, and Meditacion Fronteriza: Poems of Love, Life, and Labor.

Lauren Hoogkamer, Assistant Historic Preservation Officer for the City of Tacoma

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Zoom recording

Lauren Hoogkamer will speak about her commitment to an expansive historic preservation practice that addresses the needs of diverse communities. A self-described multicultural woman, her work is informed by her multidisciplinary education in journalism, business, history, urban planning, and historic preservation. Her leadership as the Assistant Historic Preservation Officer for the City of Tacoma has led to Tacoma's program being one of the nation's most creative historic preservation initiatives. In the session, Hoogkamer will present case studies that focus on underrepresented communities and which have broadened access and equity in the field. Participants will be inspired and informed to reach out to different audiences through creative outreach and education programs and to engage with Lauren during a Q&A after her talk.

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Lauren Hoogkamer is the Assistant Historic Preservation Officer for the City of Tacoma. She holds an M.S. in Historic Preservation and an M.S. in Urban Planning from Columbia University, as well as a BA/BA in Print Journalism and History and a Minor in Business from the University of Southern California. She has received awards for journalism and poetry and has research published by the World Monuments Fund. Hoogkamer grew up in rural Lewis County, WA, but now lives in Tacoma with her husband, two sons, a dog, and a cat. As a historic preservation professional, she wants to ensure that our built environment represents and meets the needs of our diverse community. Her work is inspired by her experiences as a multicultural woman; she is Mexican, Trinidadian, Black, French, Chinese, East Indian, and a little bit of almost everything else.

Roberto Lovato, author of "Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs and Revolution in the Americas"

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Zoom recording

Join the journalist, memoirist, and activist Roberto Lovato, and Leslie Rubinkowski, academic director of the M.F.A. in Nonfiction, as they discuss his book Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas, and explore the role of the writer in this historical moment.

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Roberto Lovato is the author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs and Revolution in the Americas (Harper Collins), a New York Times “Editor’s Choice” that the paper's Book Review hailed as a “powerful” nonfiction book and a “groundbreaking memoir.” Newsweek listed Lovato’s memoir as a “must read” 2020 book and the Los Angeles Times listed it as one of its 20 Best Books of 2020. Lovato is also an educator, journalist and writer based at The Writers Grotto in San Francisco, California. As a Co-Founder of #DignidadLiteraria, he helped build a movement advocating for equity and literary justice for the more than 60 million Latinx persons left off of bookshelves in the United States and out of the national dialogue. A recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center, Lovato has reported on numerous issues—violence, terrorism, the drug war and the refugee crisis—from Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Haiti, France and the United States, among other countries.

J. Drew Lanham, birder, naturalist, hunter-conservationist, and author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. 

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Zoom recording

Join Dr. J. Drew Lanham in his talk about discovering his ecological identity as a Black man in the South and who as an ecologist and university professor serves as an important voice for learning from the fractured legacies of conservation woven into the histories of African American land and water stewardship.

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A native of Edgefield, South Carolina, J. Drew Lanham is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, which received the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Southern Book Prize, and was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal. He is a birder, naturalist, and hunter-conservationist who has published essays and poetry in publications including Orion, Audubon, Flycatcher, and Wilderness, and in several anthologies, including The Colors of Nature, State of the Heart, Bartram’s Living Legacy, and Carolina Writers at Home. An Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University, he and his family live in the Upstate of South Carolina, a soaring hawk’s downhill glide from the southern Appalachian escarpment that the Cherokee once called the Blue Wall.

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